A Journey through Miscellanea

Life, like tracing paper

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:28:56 -0400

Tracing paper fills my life. There, I said it. It’s not even meant to be poetic - I have the bloody stuff all over the place. I use tracing paper pads in lieu of counsel’s notebooks. I have them in my office and in my home. I probably go through more of the stuff than a horde of feral architects on coke, and I don’t even do architecture-y stuff. Best of all, all of it is neatly barcoded, scanned and archived.

Tracing paper embodies a process for me. I like the touch of tracing paper and the velvety shine of ink applied on it, but that’s not the real attraction. Tracing paper allows for a way of developing ideas normal paper doesn’t. You start sketching and you commit yourself to things - you have to start over if you’d like to refine something. Not with tracing paper. Give me a difficult task, and in five minutes, I’ve filled a square post-it with the three big issues. I take the fat marker edge of a Copic Studio marker, and draw three circles, each standing for one of the big ideas - and I connect them. I tear the sheet out, date and number it, and lay it under the next sheet. This is iteration two: I work out the three big issues constituting each big issue. And so on, and so forth, ever going one pen width thinner, until I’m pencilling in minuscule details over 0.1mm marks made with an isograph. If I need to explain my point, I can always pick up one of the earlier sketches, which will show a reduced picture, simple enough for someone to take in in a minute. Yet for myself, it allows me to go into as much crazy detail as I care to. It’s the ideal medium for me.

And we live life like tracing paper. Being a junior anything sucks. Junior lawyers, junior doctors, junior architects, junior accountants - any and all of us get the crappiest jobs for the least respect and pay. It’s an unenviable position much of the time, but if it does have one true exhilaration, it’s what you learn about how you’re learning. I’m not convinced learning ‘styles’ exist, but I have no doubt that we all learn differently. The experience of formation, of learning, of going through the journey of starting out as something rough and unshaped and being trained into a precision instrument, is fascinating.

It is also scary.

And I mean shit scary. In most of the professions, screwing up means someone’s life is going down the gutter - junior doctors can kill a patient, we can screw up their lives for perpetuity by bad legal advice. The stakes are high, and supervision is tight but not omnipotent. It’s never so tight as to allow you to feel like you’re in the sim. This is real flight practice, with real spins that may really sometimes be unrecoverable, leading to being real dead. For reals.

In the last two weeks, I went through the experience of screwing up and fixing my mistakes. Because any training scheme worth a damn emphasises having to do both. You mess up, you’re left on your own to mop up the stuff you created. Sometimes this is just some resentment and some broken connections, things you can get over. Sometimes it’s more, and you have to explain to a client why things are belly-up. In reality, nobody really cares for the explanation. On one hand, people are used to the fact that juniors screw up (they do it all the time), on the other, explanations don’t matter. Who cares I was on chemo. In the try-your-best society of academia, where you can make all sorts of allowances for extenuating circumstances, being sick was an excuse. In the real world, the rules of physics don’t make allowances for innocent mistakes. Gravity doesn’t care why you’re falling.

So last week, following the epic fuck-ups, I had to re-draw many things. I had to turn over a sheet of tracing paper yet again, find the solid foundations and re-draw them, but making sure I would never fall for the same mistakes again. Week by week, month by month, we draw new lines and turn over new sheets of tracing paper, never losing track of the onion-skin past beneath the tip of our pen, but always ready to add and amend and ameliorate.

And so we live and so we learn, life like tracing paper.

Acceptance of Suffering, My Ass.

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 17:31:33 -0400

You can stick your acceptance of suffering nonsense up your ass.

See, one of the most pernicious kind of shite peddled to the sick and suffering is the idea that maybe they should somehow accept their suffering, or accept that suffering is part of life, and somehow all the suffering person needs to do is to make peace with pain and all will be good.

Usually, this would be accompanied by some sanctimonious twaddle by the Dalai Lama (if you’re lucky) or Deepak Chopra (if you aren’t) about how it’ll be all better. worse, it would be accompanied by some perversion of some of the most beautiful spirituality of my faith, the Sorrowful Mysteries. So hey. Not only should you actually do a Munich on your pain and suffering, but if you actually dare suffer and be miserable and angry about it, you’re also spiritually impure and/or GOING TO HELL!!!11!!!ONE!

There are two things wrong with the whole acceptance of suffering tosh. The first is that it is a pernicious social ideology that is about the healthy/non-suffering trying to get the suffering out of their sight so the potential of the same pain happening to them will be out of their minds. Notice that they’re not teaching you to accept pain the way a good CBT pain management course does, i.e. by telling you how to live and think and breathe and stand naturally while trying to suppress the pain impulses. No, their beef is with suffering, the abstract consequence of pain, loss or misfortune that takes place in your mind and is, eventually, reflected in your social interaction. The issue isn’t “please, feel less pain” - it is “please, could you be miserable and cry in 10-pain somewhere out of my sight?”. It is the leper’s bell, the new Spinalonga, the new apartheid - as much as I hate these terms, how the hell is telling people not to emote through pain or misfortune any better than just taking anyone who isn’t flawlessly happy and sending them off to an island so you won’t have to see their faces?

The second part is more important, however. It is contrary to the human spirit to ‘accept’ or ‘make friends’ with the enemy.

Because I may, as a cynical old dog, have a lot of dim opinions of humanity and the objective value of its survival, but I love and respect the human spirit. And in case I need to explain this to anyone, the human spirit does not give up. It does not do compromises with the enemy. AND LEAST OF ALL DOES IT DELUDE ITSELF INTO SOME SELF-INDUCED MORAL AND EMOTIONAL TORPOR IN WHICH CHICKEN SHIT IS SUDDENLY CHICKEN CAESAR BECAUSE WE ACCEPTED IT.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you’re eating shit! Stop it. It’s disgusting. Even if it’s not real shit but the moral waste product of depraved, failed moralities that do not respect that humans are incredible badasses with the fire in every single base pair of their DNA that began to burn since they evolved and has sustained this species to this date, it’s disgusting.

The human response to suffering isn’t to accept it. The human response is to tell it to go do one. The human response is to recognise that for what it’s worth, any moral human being has lived in constant battle against suffering. Any morality worth a damn must be, before anything, be about diminishing suffering. There will always be suffering in the world - but that’s missing the point, the point is that our job is to fight, fight and fight again until we’ve done as much as we can to diminish suffering. No hospital shuts its doors because hey, there’ll always be sick people, and we don’t stop building dams because we know there’ll always be a Hurricane Katrina or some other freak storm named after some chick who recently dumped the meteorologist who first spotted the hurricane. The point is that as moral beings, by which I also mean reasonable beings, we cannot possibly ‘accept’ suffering. You can seek it out because you’re a masochist, that’s fine by me. Or you can take the more difficult path, knowing suffering will be a side effect. But you cannot reasonably accept suffering and expect to be seen as a reasonable, moral being - for if you generalise that stance, you submit all humanity to suffering.

If I’m alive today, rather than merely existing, it’s because I refuse to accept suffering, refuse to accept the end of man, refuse to accept that things are bound to go bad. And I’m saying this from my bed, shivering from my body rejecting its own cells and the chemo coursing through my veins poisoning me gently, and retching every five minutes so hard that I am almost certain I broke a rib *again*. So don’t you tell me I don’t understand that shit happens. But I don’t accept it. I am alive because I don’t accept that this is life. I am alive because I rage against the fucking arse cunt bugger shit of an illness that landed me in this crap and swear to beat the living shit out of the motherfucker until it weeps for its mother. At which point I’ll slit its throat and drink its blood. Metaphorically, anyway. I am more than an object-that-suffers, and other than a person-who-does-the-act-of-suffering: I am someone in-the-state-of-suffering or on-whom-suffering-is-inflicted, who at the same time is a fucking angry person and does not for a second accept that this is in any way okay or part of life. If you believe suffering is a part of life, you’re entirely welcome to trade places with me.

A morality of reason does not accept suffering because it is contrary to man’s nature to suffer. Suffering is always a sign of a defect, whether it is an injury or some other damage. It indicates something not being okay. And you should ‘accept’ that? Fine, next time a cut hurts, do ‘accept’ it. You’ll end up with bacterial septicaemia and die, but at least you’ve reached nirvana, or some other Deepak Chopra bullshit. Man’s nature is to improve himself and the world around him, to strive for the best in his nature and reach for the stars, not to wallow in the acceptance of suffering. The very point of suffering being so unpleasant is to shake you awake and tell you to do something about the bloody thing, and that real soon, lest you end up dead. When you put your hand on the hot stove, the suffering means ‘take your damn hand off this thing lest you will be in flames in a minute’, not ‘accept it, and you’ll reach some higher spiritual truth’. The only higher spiritual truth to be reached by accepting suffering is an intense familiarity with the inside of the emergency department and/or a coffin.

We are who we are - our nature as human beings and our capacity of reason are our means of survival. Acceptance of suffering is immoral because it goes both against reason and nature. It offends reason because it equates the desirable with the undesirable, and it offends nature because it normalises the unnatural and damaging. The only proper response to suffering is to destroy it in any shape or form you come across it, or die trying. When you see a person with a broken arm, you heal him, you don’t tell him to accept his suffering.

Anything less is the way of the animal. The choice between the brute and the human is always open to us. We’re not a hell of a lot better, but we are better than animals - we are better because we have the faculty of reason. And that a nonsensical culture of unreason could develop that makes ‘accept your suffering’ a near-moral tenet is a sad, sad reflection on humanity today.

How good lawyers learn

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:56:38 -0400

The legal profession is huge, and ever more inclusive and diverse. It’s full of good lawyers, and bad ones. And what really tells them apart is how they learn stuff.

I’m just going to put it out here:

Good lawyers learn in a particular way: see one, do one, teach one.

Good, of course, doesn’t mean ‘peak of the profession’. You can be a ‘good’ lawyer at any level - if you are doing a good job, and having the personality expected of you by your professional role.

The essential point is that all three steps are crucial. You cannot omit one (or even two!) and expect to have anything but disaster flowing from it, long-term.

Lawyers who do one and teach one gamble with their client’s lives (and their liability insurance). It would be silly to expect a lawyer to have seen everything one may come across in practice, but in general, there are precedents for most things. Lawyers ignore these at their peril.
Lawyers who see one and teach one are called academics, and their perspective - and I’m saying this as a former academic - on the law is lacking the appreciation of the practical context in which law takes place. They see law as you would see Oedipus Rex played out in a theatre without any props and scenery and without knowing anything about the Theban Cycle. “The hell is really going on?,” you’d wonder - rightly. Going on to teach it without making the students aware that the person has never actually done anything in practice is downright dangerous.
Lawyers who see one and do one are not just a missed opportunity for the next generation, but they also miss out on the experience of teaching. I am fortunate to have had the chance to teach, and while I would probably never in a thousand years do it for a living, it was an experience that changed me. Teaching doesn’t always have to be in a classroom - and really, it boils down to the simple point of having an effective, striking style to convey often very complex information in a way it is understood and effectively processed by others. Sometimes people forget why clients retain us. You can buy pre-drafted contracts where you need to put your name in and enter the details, and hey presto. Eventually, drafting will be taken over by machines - it is already heavily automated. We’re not retained for our drafting skills or our legal knowledge, but for advice - how we give advice is part of the value of the advice we give, along with the advice itself. Correct advice, badly given, is useless - remember, the point of our advice is to enable action, not win points for a law essay.

It flows from this that good firms (like the one I work for) are the ones that let - and make! - lawyers on all levels practise these three stages. In the precise order.

See one - to know what you’re doing.
Do one - to get the feel for it.
Teach one - to learn how to explain it.

The other day, I found myself explaining drawing up a listing application to a trainee who hasn’t done one before - recalling that mere few months ago, I was the student and a senior associate the teacher.

And this is how we grow, as humans, as lawyers, as professionals, as teachers and as advisors.

Dr Clarke, or how I stopped worrying and learned to love dismembering zombies

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:53:33 -0500

Spoilers for Dead Space 1/2. Also, zombies and pissing on modern art. Read on!

I don’t know what the cavemen of Altamira and Lascaux felt when they witnessed one of their fellows drag some coloured stones over one of the walls of their dwelling, until figures of hunters and bisons appeared. I know, however, what they would have felt, had they known they have witnessed the birth of a new form of art. I know it because I spent eight hours dismembering zombies, and I came out a better person. But let’s not rush ahead.

Ask yourself “what is art”, and you immediately think of your favourite painting, perhaps your favourite piece of music, possibly a statue. Sure, they’re pieces of art, but why? To me, art means a creation of man that reflects a human narrative. Narrative is essential to all art in my view - visual arts, music, performing arts and literature alike, the crucial point of art is a narrative. Why is narrative so important? Because it is the narrative quality that makes art such a crucial thing in our lives: art is a way of processing complex emotions, discharging those emotions, and communalising them.

The cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira were not scribbles at the bottom of the cave, small marks on someone’s own personal effects or left at some random rock outside. They were prominently displayed on the walls of the caves. They speak of communal experience - the excitement of the hunt, the risk, the importance and sometimes the weight resting on hunters: fail to kill the bison, and your tribe may have to go without food.

Art answers a basic human need, much more basic than aesthetics. In Maslow’s hierarchy, creativity appears at the top of the pyramid. Art has been seen as the luxury of civilisations, as something a culture does once it has satisfied its basic needs. “Erst das Fressen, dann die Moral” - as Brecht said, and “-und dann, vielleicht, Kunst.”, he might have added. Yet that is a misperception of art as carrying solely an aesthetic value. Aesthetics is the vessel, not the human goal, in art. Art isn’t created because it’s pretty, it is created because the artist has a story to tell, because there is a narrative and he’ll burst unless he tells it. Well, most art worth considering, anyway.

Art is as essential to us as breathing, food or water. It is the most human way to process human experience. Mimesis and symbolism allow the artist to tell the story without telling the story, to process the narrative while also distancing himself sufficiently, and also to make it universal, a narrative everyone can join in. The preoccupation with aesthetics, in which we all diverge - de gustibus non est &c. -, renders art moot. It creates an appreciation of art that is akin to walking around a cake shop appreciating the cakes, and leaving without having any (and having done that, I tell you, it’s a painful experience!).

“Wovon man nicht reden kann, daruber muss man schweigen.” But Wittgenstein didn’t say you can’t paint the unspeakable, inexpressible, ineffable, illogible (that’s my neologism: for word-shaped statements that express the Godel sentence of the given axiom system, i.e. the language - statements that are true, but cannot be expressed within the axiom system). Symbolic processing of human experience through art communalises experiences by 1) distancing, 2) generalisation. Few people experience anguish in the same way, yet consider Edvard Munch’s Scream: just about any sufferer of an anxiety disorder would recognise her mental state in the stark lines, screaming colours and face distorted by pure emotional power of the Scream. Art is a social signal that establishes narratives - it allows people with a particular emotion to find their narrative in the bigger, generalised narrative, and makes them feel part of something, rather than alone. Athenians attended plays, in particular tragedies, not just because they loved it, because the actors were great (very few of them are remembered, compared to playwrights) and most definitely not because it was fun. They went for something entirely different: community.

They went for Oedipus Rex, because in the downfall of the righteous man who suffers truly rotten moral luck, they saw their own anxiety: will my life be undone by the same invisible hands? Katharsis is not just individual - it was an experience shared with hundreds, if not thousands, of other Athenians. “Behold,” the play said - “this is what happened to the great king Oedipus” - and everyone, for a moment, felt, in his heart, his part of the pain and anxiety of Oedipus, Thall together, at the same time. Katharsis was not merely purification of the individual, but also a very social event, in which he was aware that he was not alone. It happened to Oedipus. The guys sitting next to me look fairly weepy, too. We all have the fear that our life may be adversely affected by bad moral luck - but we have hope. We have a way to process that anxiety as a community. We are not alone.

This is art. When William Faulkner appeared, wearing the first suit he ever bought in his life, at the City Hall of Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, he “decline[d] to accept the end of man”. Man will prevail, and art will be integral to him - because it creates a narrative in which life is worth living, in which man can connect to each other through the shared experience of those very human matters that are on one’s mind. These were Faulkner’s words:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

***

Enough about art. Time for zombies. I am, frankly, quite surprised how few visual artists (other than film-makers) and composers have engaged with the concept of zombiehood. What is lacking in Zombie Symphonies and paintings of enraged men with hatchets lunching on someone’s innards is, however, more than adequately made up for by the movie industry (mainly B-movies). Why are there so many zombie movies? They’re not that interesting, really.

The answer: there is a social narrative they tie in. In the philosophy of mind, zombies are interesting in musing about consciousness. The mind in its healthy state is a quite fascinating thing, but rather uninformative. Damage - or, to use the favourite term of neurologists: deficit - is what shows us the interesting stuff: the correlation of the insult to the brain with the effects on the conscious self. Unfortunately, people who are just like people but have no consciousness are not readily available to philosophers, so they have constructed the notion of a philosophical zombie: a creature much like a human being, but without consciousness.

The human narrative in zombiehood is about consciousness, too, but only on a tangent. The real issue is identity. Zombies are, as it is often emphasised in the genre, people who are known or attached to protagonists. Then the classic lines are uttered about how they are something different now. The social narrative that fuels our interest in zombies is this fear: the fear of losing our identity, the fear that somehow who we are might be erased from our minds, and we would start out eating brains. Indeed had rotten flesh not become a genre convention, I wager interest in zombie flicks would be the same if they would keep their healthy appearance - but their unnatural shape reflects the distance we perceive them as, it paints them as manifestly alien not to ourselves as persons only, but to humanity in general: in particular, the choice of an unnatural skin colour (green, which is never observed in nature) and cannibalistic behaviour - a breach of one of the deepest, most universally shared human conventions - distances them from humanity. They’re now ‘something else’. But what if I turn into something else? I am rather sure nobody watching a zombie flick has not, ever, even once, thought about what he would do in the case of a zombie apocalypse - if he were one of the survivors. Then, of course, one shudders with the thought of possibly having to kill friends, relatives, family who are now ‘something else’.

The Dead Space series of video games are, on the surface, your typical zombie shooters. True, there are some unusual features, such as the extensive use of work tools as weapons and the importance of ‘strategic dismemberment’ of enemies rather than inflicting massive centre mass damage or a headshot (trust me, most enemies will be perfectly happy to come at you even if you decapitate them). And as a zombie shooter, it takes all the conventions of the genre, and then cranks them up to 11. There are infant zombies. No, you can’t get around killing them. There are zombies with the bodies of babies. They are nasty and they explode. Every person I know who has ever carried a weapon, myself included, quietly prays when removing his gun from the rack in the morning for never, ever, having to fire a shot in anger at women and children. Dead Space 2 challenges you. Get upset. Get emotional. Even if it’s a damn video game, wonder about what sort of person you are. Ponder whether the human rule against hurting children covers those who are for all intents and purposes ‘gone’, and now act only as hosts for a parasite. Dead Space 2 takes you out of your comfort zone.

That’s just a lateral matter, though - because Dead Space and Dead Space 2 both treat a crucial human story, with accuracy, gentleness (yes really, in a zombie shooter!), compassion and sheer, heartbreaking, beauty.

Dead Space 1 is about loss - processing loss, living through it, and guilt. Dead Space 1 is actually two stories rolled into one: the protagonist Isaac Clarke’s quest to get off the vessel Ishimura alive, which has been infected by zombies after recovering a mysterious alien artifact called the Marker (a sort of psychological zombie-making and hallucination-generating device). On a different level, it is the story of Isaac’s grief for his girlfriend Nicole, the Ishimura’s medical officer, who committed suicide to avoid being turned into a zombie. This story follows the Kubler-Ross model: Denial (with Nicole’s hallucinated appearances), Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Except substitute Anger for Bargaining and Depression. The Marker, the mysterious alien object, is not merely a zombie-generating machine. It’s a representation of loss, trauma and bad moral luck in one’s life. In your average zombie flick, zombieness is spread by a virus. The fact that they objectified the loss of consciousness and identity that comes with zombiehood in the shape of the Marker shows the subtlety and intelligence Dead Space 1 deals with the zombie issue and the human story of loss at the same time.

Dead Space 2 is about what comes after loss. Together, they tell the human story of loss - or, as one could equally call it, the story of trauma. Through the trauma narrative of Isaac, who in Dead Space 2 has recently been freed from the psych ward after a short stay of, oh, ten years or so, it discusses trauma in general. Isaac displays the hallmark symptoms of post-traumatic stress, and sometimes violent flashbacks seize him. But really, that’s just so the developers could show off some visual effects. The real subtle damage of trauma is the past becoming determinative of the present. Isaac’s special link to the Marker comes into play in Dead Space 2. His experiences on the Ishimura and the loss of Nicole act like a predestination to be involved when the marker pops up again and causes trouble.

Trauma is gross and subtle at the same time. Gross trauma is easy to deal with. Despite occasional inferences, Isaac is not demented (in fact, compared to most of the crap that goes on around him, he’s remarkably sane). He is coherent and sensible. The damage done is subtle, and I have never seen a video game, or indeed a film or anything similar, to capture the ontological damage of post-trauma: the link to the original causant.

And to a point, it is about healing. It is about letting go, it is about fighting off a hallucination of Nicole one last time, this time face-to-face with the Marker itself. It is about closure, and Isaac wins his closure by shattering the past. The Marker’s destruction is Isaac’s victory over loss. When the Marker as a symbol of bad moral luck, loss, ill fate is destroyed, Isaac’s journey of healing ends. He can now let go, because the past will no longer determine his future: with the Marker gone, he has both taken his revenge on the thing that killed Nicole, and, by battling a hallucination of Nicole, accepted that she was dead, that reunification with her would not be possible, and that he now is free.

To have captured such a complex, subtle subject with so much Fingerspitzengefuhl all the while making a wonderful game is art. It’s not art because I like it or because it’s pretty - it’s art because it discusses a human narrative, one so deeply in our hearts: if I lose the things I love, how will I carry on? How do I carry on - and indeed, how do I live right now? - in a world of Damocles’ swords above all our heads? Dead Space’s answer: with an upright head, and dismembering zombies all the way through.

We are witnessing the birth of a new art form - interactive games that can discuss the most complex of human topics in depth that puts the other muses to shame at their beneficiaries’ incompetence. While the debate rages on about the aesthetics of modern art, while a small clique of pretentious barrel-aged hipsters screams about less funding for great works of art like a sheep in formaldehyde, something new is being born. There is now a deeper way, some seem to have found, to engage people with crucial narratives that make us human - the fear of the future, the fear of loss, and so on. These are our ‘mortal questions’. We ask these questions not because it’s a standard in every philosophy graduate course, but because they derive from who we are. Our very nature calls us to feel, to fear, to think, to reconcile and to find comfort. And a genre has just grown up to take its part in art’s response to the human condition and the narratives it raises. Video games are at the verge of becoming one of those props and pillars that can help humanity process and prevail.

And like the cavemen watching the first painter ought to have been, I feel privileged, so privileged, to witness this.

Absolution

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 05:43:08 -0500

Grab a pen. Now write something. Congratulations, you’re Spiderman.

Send a heartbeat to
The void that cries through you -
Relive the pictures that have come to pass.

After I wrote what my chance at survival gave me, at the experience of grace and mercy it has meant to me, I have received literally hundreds of replies through every single imaginable medium. With the permission of the author, I will quote from one of many emails (turns out, my post became one of those things posted around the internet - I’m hoping someone will spin a bizarre enough urban legend around its origins to make Snopes.com!) I received:

Your writing gave me hopes [sic], hope that I too may get better and I have printed it and read it many times. Thank you.

The words we put down on paper or reduce to bits are our children. We bring them into existence, form them into shapes and conformations they have never been in, create a Something from Nothing. They spread from our hands like Spiderman shooting webs. And those words take flight and spread through the planet at the speed of light in a fibre optic cable, and they find those deserted, lone cracks in people’s hearts that have been waiting just for the right words, those rips in the fabric of our broken, torn universe that they can mend, and they become torniquets and bandages on this bleeding, wounded world, healing its wounds little by little, one by one - and having brought them into the world, we are responsible for them. We can no more undo them than we can undo our deeds. In the words of the poet Omar Khayyam,

The moving finger writes, and having writ
Moves on: not all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

No, our words are written, and they have been brought to life: they are no longer our slaves, and may well become our masters. Words heard and understood live their own life, and affect people. They create endless, fragile threads from one human to another that can lift another up - or drag her down.

And so it is difficult to write after my last post. I have long thought about abandoning this tumblr. I never intended it to be about myself and illness, yet this is the second post almost dealing with it. It was meant to be a dumping ground for whatever was on my mind, and at the moment, this happened to occupy most of my brain - in general, that is more exceptional than the norm. More difficult it is to reconcile the beasts fighting in me - one demanding honesty and another demanding I be compassionate and not demolish the faint flicker of hope my last post may have ignited in some hearts I will never get to meet.

I want to write, and I want to write without the burden of what I have written in the past. I want to write badly (well, worse than in my previous posts). I want to write about mundane things. I want to write about what I see and experience, and illness is a very small part of it (trust me, managing it swiftly becomes second nature). I want to be a pessimistic fuck, because that’s part of life and if you’re not pessimistic every now and then, you should scale down on the happy pills. I want to wonder, I want to breathe, I want to laugh and cry and be an obnoxious asshole and be infinitely compassionate and be all those things that make up one’s personality, without feeling the need of having to conform to what I have said in the past. There was never a coherent plan for this tumblr, I mainly set it up so my writings can be stored somewhere. It’s not my Dear Diary with the cheap padlock, it’s not my shrink-for-free, it’s not my manifesto. I write because I need to, and I want to write whatever I feel I need to.

So I am asking for absolution.

I am asking for absolution from any expectations set that I will write in a particular way - or indeed that I will ever write here again (trust me, I will). I am asking for absolution from any presumptions made about my writing. I am asking for absolution so I can talk about life, not some constructed reality where everything is Infinitely Important, Tremendously Uplifting and a Work of Great Genius. I am asking for absolution so I can give life to words that do not touch life and death. Also, shit jokes.

Thank you.

I sommersi e i salvati

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 07:29:42 -0500

My name is Chris, and this is the story of how I died.

Death has been a frequent visitor in my life.

Me and him first met in my first hours of life, which were a struggle - born premature and sickly, I had a 50/50 chance to be conquered by him. I pulled through - then years later, in another bout of sickness, he appeared again on the horizon, a shadowy figure floating in the distance. His grasp, I’d like to think, was tentative.

Hominem se esse etiam triumphans in illo sublimissimo curru admonetur; suggeritur enim ei a tergo: “Respice post te! Hominem te memento!”

That [Caesar] is a man he is reminded even when he is riding in his triumphal chariot. For a hint comes to him from the rear: ‘Look behind you! Remember that you are a man!’

- Tertullian, Apologeticus, cap.XIII.4.

“Remember”, the slave whispers to the triumphant leader. “You are but a man, mortal and vulnerable. You, too, will die one day.” I’ve heard that slave’s whispers throughout my triumphs, every single one. Whether a tinge of joint pain, the fatigue that comes with a flare or the handful of medications gulped down before starting the day to suppress my disease, I was reminded throughout of my humanity.

I clearly remember the first morning I knew something was amiss. I returned from a rowing outing, shed my lycra outer skin, and prepared some porridge. An hour later, I was bent over the toilet bowl, in intense pain, heaving. I ascribed it to a stomach bug, though I was somewhat dubious - I was not feverish or otherwise unwell, I just vomited up everything I ate.

Three days later, when astronomical doses of buccal domperidone haven’t even touched the constant nausea, I was on the verge of starting to look for my neighbourhood opioid dealer, for whatever opioid I could lay my hands on. It was thanks to my sister’s wise advice and the support of my local NA group that I went and saw my GP instead.

“Look, Doc, I’m quite sure this is nothing. Just a tummy bug or something. Can I have something more powerful than domperidone?” Dr. L looked concerned. I’ve never seen him look concerned, not through my entire ordeal with PTSD, through which he guided me and helped me access the appropriate treatment, not ever as an academic or in any other context. Two days later, I looked at the bleak off-white plastic donut of the CT scanner as it perused my body, slice by slice, looking for “something that could explain your problems”, as the young radiologist said. That meant one of two things - a bowel obstruction or a tumour. Neither was a good sign. The CT came back clear, and as I walked home looking at a printout of the images, I was wondering whether I drew the short or the long straw with that.

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved Earth and Heaven

- Tennyson, Ulysses.

After the usual blood tests and some other scans to exclude other causes, we were left with a single conclusion: gastroparesis. “And this is where my knowledge of things ends”, Dr. L said. “I don’t know what has caused it, I don’t know how it came about and I have absolutely no idea what I can give you if domperidone doesn’t work”. I was referred to the nearest specialist willing to deal with my case - who replied the next day saying he is happy to see me, in six weeks. I didn’t have six weeks.

Or six days, as it turned out. I was in the library the next day when my GP rang me, with a panicked voice. My blood potassium level was 2.2 - normal values range between 3.6 and 5.0. Hypokalaemia, as a low potassium level is officially called, is one of the leading causes of death when electrolytes and liquids are insufficiently replenished in vomiting, causing seizures and eventually heart failure. I called a cab (something I have never done before, as everything was a stone’s throw away, but I did not want to run the risk), and the next thing I remember is me laying half asleep, hooked up to a banana bag.

Banana bags - liquid electrolyte solutions, looking vaguely yellowish hence the name - saved my life. With no-one willing to make a decision on a feeding tube, I relied on daily IVs of fluids, electrolytes and glucose to stay alive. Meanwhile, I completed my final examinations for the degree of B.C.L., one of the hardest examinations in the world, a gruelling closure to an equally challenging course. The Proctors kindly allowed me to sit the exams apart from the great unwashed, who sat on old wooden tables in the faux Gothic-ish halls of the Examination Schools. During one paper, I had to take seven breaks - I spent more time outside, puking, than in the room, writing. That I passed is probably one of the miracles I shall never come to understand.

We are who we are. Crisis doesn’t change us; we deal with blows of fate as we deal with anything else. We don’t have a crisis personality. I carry on, because that’s what I do. I reduce the problem to its parts - like Furstenberg’s prime infinity proof. Lay out the topology. See what unique properties it has. Try things. If you get absurdity, discard. I make sense of things by reducing them to make them bearable. I’m having a tough time doing it right now. It’s scary that this crisis can’t be put into simple maths.

- Diary entry, dated 13 July 2011

After the ordeal of endless procedures, the insertion of a permanent feeding tube on which I now depend 100%, accusations of an eating disorder and self-inflicted starvation and more procedures and tests, the diagnosis was confirmed, but no cause could be found. That is, until that late September day. I was sipping on the truly ghastly coffee from the hospital cafeteria as I waited for my appointment.

“I think you have Autoimmune Autonomic Neuropathy”, Dr. K. said. “It fits. You have a history of autoimmune illness. You have marked leukocyte accumulation in your biopsied tissues but little eosinophils. It’s the first time I have ever diagnosed someone with AAN, so I am not absolutely certain. It’s that or a mitochondrial disease we cannot readily detect. But if it’s either…” - he went into his quiet voice. “Neither of them have a good prognosis.”

The cognitive dissonance was insane. Despite all the problems I had with taking up nutrition, I was relatively healthy. I had healthy liver and kidney function tests, which are quite important if you’re planning on living any length of time. I was starting to exercise again now that I had my nutrition provided. I was, for any purpose of the word, ‘getting better’.

“Normally, patients like you would progressively get worse, until their intestines are affected, at which point TPN has to be initiated. With the body already weakened, the chances of surviving long-term on TPN for such patients are very low, —”

“Straight talk, Doc”, I cut him off.

“Five to ten years. Probably towards the upper end. Gradual decay.”

Tee one-half equals natural logarithm of two divided by lambda, I thought. My mind was racing to grasp at something I could hold on to. Something that made more sense than a twenty-five-year-old being told he has a decade at best. With treatment. Decay. Total activity equals lambda times total particle count. Decay. Dee enn-dee over dee tee equals enn-zero times sigma see-aye ee to the power of minus lambda tee, aye equal zero. Decay.

“Hello?” Dr. K’s bold baritone jolted me back into the world of reality. The one that made no bloody sense to me right then. None at all.

If Kubler-Ross is correct, there are five stages of dying. She probably isn’t correct as far as I’m concerned. I oscillated, for weeks, between not giving a crap about it and being angry. I don’t bargain because, well, it won’t work. Death isn’t listening. He’s busy going through the Spice Girls collection on his iPod while wandering around and reaping souls.

I have thought much about what this moment of liminality would be like. I guess this is, in a way, the beginning of what the Tibetan Book of the Dead called the chikhai bardo, the liminal state of dying, except a prolonged one. A transition period, a preparation, a learning curve. As over the day I am a trainee of the art of legal practice, I would now be a trainee of dying - a long preparation of dealing with separation and loss and being gone.

Life didn’t change. I still woke at 0630hrs. I still went to work. I still lived and loved and hoped, with the same passion as before. The world didn’t change. My routine didn’t change. I didn’t book a flight to Barbados, punch my boss, shoot a stranger or take drugs (apart from the ones I was prescribed - they’re making me mad enough, thanks very much).

I changed.

My view on life changed. Not in the stereotypical way, mind you - this isn’t a soon-to-be-made-into-a-film story of nasty corporate lawyer sees the light and becomes good person from dying. No, that isn’t what it was.

It allowed me to see the world without me. It allowed me to see the beauty in everything, the possibilities of every morning, the subtle hope in every breath of air and the unlimited, incredible possibilities laid into our hands every time the sun rises. It allowed me to see the miracle of every morning, day and evening. I saw all Creation in a new way, so conscious that all there is, is there as a product of fortunate coincidences, of thin threads and razors’ edges, of a tenuous, weak hold on this thing called life or existence, which the smallest of changes - a simple mutation of a couple of base pairs among millions in the human DNA - could upset forever. And I saw that existence is not to be presumed, but a gift, and an incredibly vulnerable one.

Damindas, when Philip invaded Peloponnesus, and one said that the Spartans would suffer great mischiefs unless they accepted his proposals, said, Thou woman-man, what misery can we suffer that despise death?

- Plutarch, Apothegmata Laconica

This is a story about the saved, not the drowned.

My lifesaving discovery came from Dr. W. As a pretty junior fellow but a rising star in neurogastroenterology, his room was tiny, yet a relief from the waiting room filled with pale, sickly people on drips, in various stages of decay. Ess ay of ay-zero equals natural logarithm of two over lambda, I tried to distract myself from the future laid out before me - my future. Up until that day.

Bloods and biopsies and talks later, Dr. W. stormed into his tiny room, a stack of films and papers under his arm.

“I don’t think you have AAN”, he said. “Look.”.

I stared at the immunofluorescence images that should have marked out all the nerves in bright luminescent green, showing immune activity. It was all pretty dark. Then I looked at my cell count - which had the real surprise.

“See, we do ferritin as a routine test here, as a lot of patients have iron transport issues, especially those on TPN,” he mumbled, as he shoved the paper over. My ferritin level was 4500. The normal maximum? 150.

“Ow! Stopit!,” I moaned, in a rather embarrassing fashion, as he palpated the region where my spleen and liver are supposed to be. An hour later, an ultrasound confirmed hepatosplenomegaly - an enlarged liver and spleen.

“They’re enlarged because they’re bursting with dysfunctional cells that are supposed to keep you safe. You have haemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis.”

“Wha?” It’s quite a first to hear a diagnosis I’ve never, ever heard about. Two hours later, most of which was spent with a friendly onc/hem whom I now tend to refer to as the Blood Countess, I knew a bit more. I also knew that I now belonged under oncology/haematology, rather than GI. As she walked me towards her office across the labyrinthine corridors of the hospital that for centuries grew as a patchwork of additions and extensions to what once was an old teaching morgue, we walked through a whole laundry list of departments, until, at one double-door magically flung open when the Blood Countess’s badge passed the doorside RFID scanner, I stopped still. That was when it hit me.

The sign above the door said “Oncology/Haematology” - the latter in smaller letters, appended as an afterthought apparently.

I don’t tend to get scared. I’ve seen enough horrors not to. I’m not fearless, I just simply don’t do getting scared - I just get emotionally exhausted and broken afterwards. Yet there, I felt tiny and alone in the world, like the whole universe had collapsed on me, the entire mess of my situation so far crashing like a…

“He’s awake!”, the nurse shouted. I have, apparently, fainted and been out for a good ten minutes.

After a good while, I was fit to finally talk to the Blood Countess about my future - and my prognosis.

“Your prognosis?”, she said, looking at the papers - “Of course, there are risks to any treatment, and you will have to undergo some form of chemotherapy, whether oral or IV, and there’s the risk of future cancers, and this may…”

“Years, Doc. I don’t do ‘risks’.”

“I don’t know. Lots. If you respond well to the meds, it shouldn’t shorten your lifespan by much, maybe 10-15 years.”

“Wait, so… I’m not dying?” I was nonplussed.

“You’re seriously ill. The treatment can kill you, now or later. Infections can kill you. Heck, the disease itself can flare up to max and boil your brain. But other than that… you’re not dying. Barring any of the previous, you can live a long life.”

“A long life, in seriously ill terms.”

“Yes.”

For about ten minutes, we sat there, her looking at my reaction, me looking quietly at the floor, overwhelmed.

I was overwhelmed because I didn’t really know what to feel. More than anything, I had immense gratitude to the Lord that things were set right. Over the course of the weeks that followed, the diagnosis was confirmed by a specific antibody test, and AAN ruled out. At the same time, I was overwhelmed by fear about the following treatment, about the side effects,the risks, the pain, the difficulties. Yet somehow, the feeling of having been chosen for grace erased it all, like a blank slate wiped clean by God’s hands. And more than anything, this experience changed me, transformed me - not into a new person, but into a person with a better view of the fragility of life.

My name is Chris, and this was the story of how I didn’t die.

_________________

(I am indebted to Primo Levi for the title, which I borrowed from a book his, in which he attempts an analytical approach to the horrors of a Vernichtungslager as I attempt an analytical approach to the subject of this essay.)

John Edmond - Troopie Boy, You’ve Won One of those songs I...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:48:54 -0500

John Edmond - Troopie Boy, You’ve Won

One of those songs I wish more people listened to. Dedicated to the fighters, the warriors, the troopie boys, the lonely vet fighting PTSD whose wife packed up and left last night and the guy whose boss called him lazy and unreliable not knowing he is on chemo, for the broken-hearted and for those who still believe, want to believe, in fairness - that they, too, will someday get justice.

On war, piss and redemption.

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 07:55:56 -0500

War is hell. The triviality of that statement, and its common acceptance, somehow drains it of any value, so let me put an emphasis on the last word: War is HELL.

Military units are based on interdependence - and interdependence at work creates bonds that go beyond work. As combat gets more and more specialised, soldiers are no longer independently operating units but parts of a larger unit structure with particular roles and responsibilities that jointly complement each other. The rifleman in his foxhole depends on the combat engineer who dug it, who depends on the quartermaster to supply him with the adequate equipment, who in turn depends on the mechanics who keep the equipment in working order, and so on. There is an intense web of trust, and inevitably it creates a web of friendship, yea brotherhood. When Henry V rallied his troops, he addressed them as a “band of brothers”. How ridiculous, one would think - a king, ‘brother’ to the commoners of mostly impoverished backgrounds who fought for him on that day? Yet on St Crispin’s day, the lowliest servant in the host of Henry V was his brother. Combat made them brothers. However the world separates people, through constraints of class, race, gender - extraordinary experiences unite them, and there are few experiences in human life more extraordinary than combat, those moments of sharpened senses and heightened awareness that will live in one’s memory forever - the bursts of adrenaline, muscles moving like quicksilver, no matter what fatigue wears on them - and the acute sense of danger, the vicinity of death and the decisiveness of every single moment. There is no eloquence that could describe those moments to someone who has not been part of it, and that common frame of reference alone makes those who have lived through combat part of a very exclusive brotherhood.

There is not enough space here for a cultural history of this brotherhood that like a golden thread binds all serving men and women, from the hoplites of Leonidas at Thermopylae through the archers of Agincourt to those serving in FOBs scattered across Iraq and Afghanistan, looking out onto the hostile terrain of a land that hasn’t known peace for generations. Yet one does not need to know its exact provenance to understand its strength - and to understand the profound, terrible grief of losing one’s brother in arms. Battlefield deaths, while relatively rare in current combat operations when compared to massive sacrifices of young lives in past wars, are a terrible experience. The burden it creates both precedes and antecedes death. Every soldier lives with the acute awareness that the breath they take may be their last, the bluey they read may be the last words their minds will know, the view through the iron sights may be the last picture engraved into their mind as a sniper’s bullet or an IED takes their life. The burden of impending death is a difficult one to carry and react to in a mature way - and how are we to expect 18-year-olds to respond maturely to what great men could not find an answer to? This is compounded by a culture of ‘KBO’ - keep buggering on. Grief must be suppressed, deferred, sublimated, for it would interfere with combat operations. There is little space for the story of grief to be played out, a fortiori so collectively. And grief is a collective experience - the loss of someone of a group, and how it impacts on the persons they left behind. The thread has been torn apart, and now those who remain have to reconnect and build those links again and be whole again.

But there’s not much time for this in war. You suck it up and carry on. The pain remains, as an unresolved, festering wound. The soldier is left virtually alone with the duty of carrying on as if nothing had happened on one side, and resolving his internal issues, his fears, his grief and his anger - anger at the world, the enemy, his own forces, his government, life, God and mortality.

After Patroclos dies, we see a lot of anger in Achilles. He, whom the poet has until then described as a self-confident, agile warrior with some pride/ego issues, turns into a beast. His loss of humanity is complete when he desecrates the body of Hector, the enemy commander. Dragging his bloody corpse through the streets, he has turned into an animal - grief and anger are now running the show. For men are self-aware and aware of their mortality, and respect the dead: even the enemy dead. Animals, however, live in the moment, full of drive and desire and emotion, devoid of those very human capacities of reason and compassion that ought to bear on one’s mind in such a situation.

And so we come to the present crisis, being one involving some US Marines urinating on some dead Iraqis:

US forces in Afghanistan are facing fresh accusations of war crimes after film emerged which appears to show American marines urinating on dead bodies and laughing. The US military command in Kabul, which was severely embarrassed last year by revelations that Americans soldiers were running a “kill squad” murdering Afghan civilians, said it would investigate the undated video, and that if it proved to be authentic, desecration of corpses would be regarded as a serious crime.

Despoiling of the dead is illegal under the Geneva conventions as well as under US military law.

In the graphic short video, four soldiers in combat gear and carrying weapons are seen acting in unison as they urinate on three bloodied corpses. One of the soldiers sighs with relief, another says “yeah” and a third laughs. One remarks: “Have a great day, buddy”. Another says: “Golden, like a shower”.

A fifth soldier films the incident.

Now, one may not logically evade the thought that these Marines actually *created* those corpses in the first place, and we’re concerned with pissing on them? That aside, their act is clearly troubling. What is more is the hateful, angry response it provoked.

No normal person would, in the civilian world, urinate on a dead body. We respect the dead, even if we did not exactly like them. And I bet you the ranch that none of these men would ever, ever, have in normal life done so. But as it has been said - some things make sense in war, and in war only.

So why did they do it? You may, of course, see it as a stupid frat boy joke or a bunch of hicks from Ayla-baymah being assholes. Or you can exercise the virtue of compassion, the virtue you accuse these men of lacking. And looking beyond this symbolic act of desecrating enemy corpses, you can see the immense, tearing pain that turned men to animals, that turned these Marines into beasts that despoil beaten enemies, yea humiliate them in the most symbolic human gesture. If the effect is this horrible, imagine the pain that triggered it. How deep must one’s sorrow be to take one’s humanity? How painful must a loss be to turn man into beast? How absolute must one’s loss be to make trained professionals discard their creed and orders?

Ultimately, Achilles regained his humanity and found redemption in returning Hector to his father, Priam. No torture of Hector’s dead body can raise his beloved friend Patroclos from the dead, no horrible act of the animal within, hungering for symbolic vengeance, can give him a single minute with his friend. No, redemption cannot come from further feeding the animal within. Redemption is the restoration of a person’s humanity by rebuilding the links that connect them to other members of society - and God. Traumatic experience tears the individual apart, and sometimes even the strongest links are tested while most weaker ones tear without effort. The traumatised person is a lonely person. Worse, he is a lonely person with a communal narrative, a play that cannot be acted out in monologue. He cannot heal alone, he needs his community’s assistance. Yet society rejects veterans every day. The experience that sets them apart is seen by society as dangerous (such as the feeble-minded Janet Napolitano’s frequent warnings about soldiers forming right-wing terror cells), useless or plain scary. Nobody wants to talk about war, guts and the time they had to scoop up Smithy’s intestines in his body armour. The veteran remains alone, not only semantically/epistemically separated from society, but also separated by their rejection.

There is no way to understand the grief one must have inside to desecrate an enemy’s body in such a horrendous way. There is no way to understand the cynicism and stupidity, either, in those who approach the issue with an utter lack of compassion just because they disagree with war or The War. These men will now be painted like animals, because that is what is safe for society. And that is right, they were animals - but once they were humans, and that is the scary, frightening side of the story that will not be talked about, the part that shows that things can happen to someone that turn them into animals. The vulnerability of our virtuous, good character is our best-guarded human secret. It is not guarded by cryptography or walls, it is guarded by demonising the animal and ignoring the human he once was. For that is what the healthy, untraumatised, fortunate masses need: the fuelling of a communal delusion that they are immune to the effects of trauma on the character. This is human society’s best-kept secret - and it is kept at the expense of the traumatised, who are further made outcasts and villains.

One day, those Marines will come home - from what it looks like, I’m afraid it will be to Club Fed in Leavenworth for a couple of years. Undoubtedly they’ve done the crime and should do the time. Our moral assessment, however, of their actions, should never ignore the circumstances. We cannot accuse another of lack of compassion unless we ourselves are willing to exercise it.